This Woman's Work by Kim Gordon

Author:Kim Gordon [Gleeson, Sinéad and Gordon, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Diaphoresis

Margo Jefferson

1957–59

I stare at the album cover: BUD POWELL: JAZZ ORIGINAL.

When I’m alone I take it out of the record cabinet and stare, whether or not I intend to play it. Sometimes I put it back unplayed. And think on that face, that dark, sweating face.

The camera has presumed to walk up and stare. He’s closed his eyes. His face is shadow and smoky light against a gray and muted-black night expanse. His hair and mustache are black. There’s a patch of white shirt and striped tie, a patch of suit. He could be floating alone in a cosmos of his own design. His lips are parted. (Humming, breathing, as he sweats.) He’s possessed by his music. In a state of ecstatic—let us use the Greek word for sweat—diaphoresis.

I was eight, I was nine, and I’d learned to slip the record from its jacket, hold it by the edges and avoid breathing quickly when I placed it on the spindle and pressed (“don’t hit, press”) PLAY. I would choose records for the whole family to hear but I’d always find separate time to listen alone on the living room couch, sometimes rocking back and forth. When I played Bud Powell’s records, I thought his piano was like Ariadne’s maze, fingers winding into runs, angling into chords, lucidity racing virtuosity across every beat and turn. I was reading Greek myths then. I made him Theseus of course, the hero wresting beauty and harmony from a monster’s grasp, his right hand unspooling the red thread of coherence, left hand scrutinizing, probing, assessing his progress.

I couldn’t admit, not yet, that he was the Minotaur too, half-man half-bull, of cursed and sacred origin; despised, feared, locked up, and turned into a ravenous monster whose task was to kill the young and beautifully human. Bud Powell was a genius-monster, made a genius through hour on hour of ravenous music listening and practice; made a monster by years of cop beatings, medications, liquor, breakdowns, electroshock treatments, heroin, and forced confinements in mental institutions. Half-man, half-beast—the designation assigned Blacks and enforced by law and practice, the punitive ire of rulers who imprisoned them in institutional labyrinths where their task was to destroy other prisoners and thereby demonstrate their own debasement. The famous story, the legend: Powell, playing the piano keys he had drawn on the wall of one such place, asking a visitor, “What do you think of these chords?” Don’t pity him. He’d crafted the tool he needed to flee brick and concrete for the glass enclosures of his music.

Brave monster, lead the way!

Give us headlong runs; give us cheeky headstrong chords and titles. “So Sorry, Please.” “Tempus Fugue-it.” “Un Poco Loco.”

Then suddenly my preteen heart would need the more tranquil strains of unimpeded romance.

The evening breeze caressed the trees… Tenderly.

I loved Erroll Garner’s version of “Tenderly.” It was written as a waltz in 1947, the year I was born, a waltz of flowing upward lifts and downward sweeps; even when jazz musicians made it a 4/4 ballad they acknowledged its mood of suave rapture.

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